TU4022--Telecommunications, Distance Learning, and Collaborative Interchange (3)
Teachers College, Columbia UniversityFall Term 1995
To increase focus on the substance of Clive Ponting's excellent book about the impact humans have had upon the globe, and to provide a second experience with creating and using home-grown web material, the class collectively, through teams, will create a complete review of Ponting's book and mount it on the web site. The pieces of text to be reviewed will be grouped as follows, each piece becoming the responsibility of a single team.
| Team | Text covered | Number of Pages |
|---|---|---|
| [1] | Chapter 2 & 3 | [39pp] |
| [2] | Chapter 4 & 5 | [51pp] |
| [3] | Chapter 6 | [29pp] |
| [4] | Chapter 7 & 8 | [44pp] |
| [5] | Chapter 9 | [33pp] |
| [6] | Chapter 10 | [30pp] |
| [7] | Chapter 11 & 12 | [40pp] |
| [8] | Chapter 13 | [30pp] |
| [9] | Chapter 14 & 15 | [40pp] |
| [10] | Chapter 16 | [45pp] |
The job of each team is to appropriately summarize the chapter or chapters assigned to that team, so that it captures the essence of what Ponting appears most interested in conveying about the state of the world and human destruction of the ecosystem. Naturally he makes some of his main points over and over again, and this should result in some redundancy in the reports when viewed across teams -- that's fine. At the same time, when he is doing his best, he relates those points to specific instances in history that are unique, and that should differ from one team's summary to another's. The purpose of the collection is to provide a handy reference on the web, for everyone to compare notes against, and to cut labor a bit, for those finding it hard to note everything, particularly when spending so much time surfing (ha!).
One of the nice additions we expect each team to make in completing their summary is this: for each chapter, suggest what single sort of photos or still graphics, what video, and what music or other sound would best add to the text's impact, given that team's interpretation of Ponting point for that chapter. For example, if any team were (none is ) doing Chapter One, they might recommend the film Rapa Nui or the recent video series about the Polynesian migrations to Easter Island, an aerial photo of the entire island, and some Polynesian music.
A final note is this: these teams are not necessarily those that will be used for the web creation during the second half of this term.